Armortek

A bit more work to complete before Model Expo at Bovington at the weekend. Bullet splash protectors added, with miniature welds made with fabric paint, which I think gives a finer finish than the traditional Milliput for small welds:



Then the fittings for the hatch closure. Thanks to David Wilkins - I took your advice and upgraded to a 6" rotary table, which I thought might be too big for my WM16 mill - it's perfect, thanks David. Turning the locking handle fittings:





Handles completed. They don't look that complicated but took a day to get right:



Regards

Stephen

Very nice Stephen.
Will have a proper look at the show.
Regards
Steve

Stephen, Pleased to hear that you happy with your 6" rotary table I recently purchased the 5" 3 jaw chuck to go with it, this has also proved to be a good investment.

Regards

David

David,I have to confess I got one of those too. Like all Vertex/Chinese stuff, they need a lot of work to get an acceptable standard. I did the standard degreasing, cleaning and re-greasing but I also found with the chuck that I had to grind the jaws to relieve them sufficiently. They were a tight interference fit to start with. The rotary table also needed a strip and set up to remove the backlash. I found some excellent "how to" videos on YouTube, which really made it simple, if tedious to do.

Thanks again.

Stephen

I too have bought one of these rotary tables, for redrilling the Quad wheels.

Although I bought the table from Ebay, I bought the chuck and mounting plate from Warco, on the basis that it should ensure that the chuck sits concentrically.

However, although the plate produced by Warco sits absolutely concentrically, when I mounted the wheel in the chuck, it was almost 0.5mm out, so needed shimming before I could drill the holes I required.

Looks like I need to strip the chuck down and see what's going on with it.

Adrian.

Adrian, hi.

A self-centering three jaw chuck will always be less accurate than a four jaw independent but it shouldn't have that error. You might try to establish the run out by mounting the table vertically and indicating it to the milling table. You could then hold a cylindrical piece and measure the runout with a dial indicator in the X and Z axes. I'd expect the runout to be less than two thou or about 0.025mm. I wasn't entirely convinced by the Warco backplate, which wasn't a tight fit in the 2MT bore. You might be able to reduce the runout to acceptable limits by careful alignment. If not, back to the suppliers.

All the best.

Stephen

Loader's hatch done. Last bits are the head pads. I used Cx5, the temperature sensitive modelling clay, which is great for reproducing fine detail and textures for the original materials, in this case Rexine. Cx5 is additive and subtractive in the strange words of the inventor, which means if you cock up, you can reheat and add bits back. Its only downside is that it's a bit fragile as a solid until you've got it firmly stuck to a strong substrate. I used a hot air gun for the initial shaping of the blanks and then some sculpting tools heated over a gentle flame for the fine detailing.





















Thanks for looking.

Stephen

nice creative solution, and good use of the fondue burner, when's the next party!, i'll bring the cheese, regards simon.

Operations in Vietnam uniquely involved Centurion in close quarter jungle fighting. The Australians very quickly identified the need for crew commanders to have extra ammunition liners readily available for the cupola mounted flex .30 MG. A simple rack holding ten liners was constructed from metal strip and angle iron and bolted to the turret roof behind the cupola. The rack was first seen at the Battles of Coral and Balmoral in 1968.








A further problem was the incompatibility between the Centurion's British Larkspur radios and the US radios in many of the Australian Task Force AFVs. This inhibited vital infantry/tank co-operation. The pragmatic but inelegant fix was to issue the tanks with a man-pack US AN/PRC 25 radio, initially on a scale of one per troop. Stowage was a problem and the .30 liner rack offered a solution.



The later racks had bowed sides to allow easy fitting of the radio, which was slightly wider than the ammunition liners. The rack fitted to 064 was of an earlier flat sided type and this is what I've replicated.









Work holding using rare earth magnets:





Liners are Armorpax and the AN/PRC 25 is from Dragon. I will need to install the correct antenna and modify the handset.





Regards

Stephen

Finishing off the .30 cal liner rack. Primed, painted and mounted:



Next, the liners. The liners are painted in Service Brown, alias SCC 2, made by mixing approximately equal proportions of Tamiya XF52 and XF63. I got the mix from using an excellent app, iModelKit. It's well worth a look for paint references and a whole host of other useful tools. The stencils were added and the liners were then sealed for weathering with a coat of Citadel Purity Seal varnish:





The Armorpax resin liners have an astonishing level of detail and to bring it out, I applied some thin oil washes. I use Abteilung 502 oils, which last forever. Oils vary in the proportion of oil to pigment, the oil producing a gloss finish. To produce a matt finish, the neat oils can be placed on card for a few hours to soak away some oil. In this case, I mixed the washes directly, using odourless turpentine:



First step is to moisten a flat brush with turpentine, dab it on paper towel until almost dry and then apply to the surfaces to be weathered. This helps the wash spread by capillary action. Then using a very fine brush, the wash is applied. After leaving for a about 15 mins, any unwanted wash can be removed with the flat brush moistened with more turpentine:





Next some before and after comparisons. I wanted the detail to stand out but the weathering to be muted. Even so, this is a bit stark but it will tone down when dust is applied later:









All coming together. The AN/PRC-25 manpack radio was equipped with two antenna, an AT/892/PRC-25 three foot blade antenna and an AT-271A/RC-10 ten foot rod antenna. I'll need to replace the one fitted here to be correct for the Australian use on Centurion:











The fire extinguisher on Paul Scott's 064 here is a later addition:



Hope this is of interest.

Stephen

Stephen,

Always interested in your update. Really appreciate your time and effort in giving such detailed information of what and how you tackle different aspects of your build.

I have just used purity seal on my latest build and am trying oils for the weathering effects. Good job that I took the advise on the forum about sealing the base coat and then using oils for weathering as it is easy to remove if one is not happy with the result. (I have already removed my first two attempts as I made a mess of it)

David

David, thanks, appreciated as ever. I've just bought a new book by Abteilung 502 on "Mastering Oils - Oil painting techniques on AFVs". It's very readable, has some superbly clear and detailed technique photos and is quite good, in way that other books aren't, on selection of oil colours to complement and shade the base coat and apply various effects. It gets you over that basic error of using black and white to darken/lighten a hue. I've found it quite useful:

http://abteilung502.com/product/masteri ... s-on-afvs/



I'm now waiting for Simon Manning to write his masterpiece on how he achieves such fantastic results.

Not much to report this time as I've spent some time working out the dimensions of the gunner's sight enclosure and the sight hood with its wiper:















Trying to extrapolate dimensions from photos works most of the time, especially with the detail that Paul Scott's photos give but a number of little errors can quickly amount to a major fit problem. I found that I'd mounted the blade vane sight too low to allow the gunner's sight enclosure to fit underneath and I'd made the sight de-icing tank filler too long. I've removed both (lesson - take photos of how you secured it) and it'll be easy to adjust. It meant that getting the precise dimensions for the sight enclosure took a little longer. A rough drawing helps here in roughing out the basic shape on the rotary table and mill:







Regards

Stephen

Continuing to rough out the gunner's sight enclosure, mostly on the mill but some hand shaping with the Proxxon with milling cutter and grinding tools:









Shame most of it will be covered when I add the gunner's sight hood and wiper motor.

Regards

Stephen

Stephen, Thanks for the information/recommendation.

David

Hi Stephen,

I'm still quietly following your amazing work - the level and quality of your detailing is incredible. The gunner's sight wont be the first hidden detail on your Centurion and even though it wont be visible I imagine you derive great satisfaction from knowing it is there.

Do please keep up the good work, so many people are finding tremendous enjoyment and knowledge from your posts.
Kevin